There is an idea abroad in the American press that, while putatively buttressed by election data, enjoys the purchase it has found because it flatters progressive sensibilities. It is the idea that, since Dobbs, Republican candidates have suffered more significant electoral consequences because of their conventionally conservative pro-life views than even as a result of their associations with Donald Trump and his favorite conspiracy theories. That is an idea that serves Donald Trump’s purposes just fine.
On Thursday, Rolling Stone published an account of Trump’s “private meetings with religious-right figures” in an effort to secure their support for his 2024 presidential bid. In those meetings, Trump reportedly said he believes that the GOP risks “losing big” if its candidates do not moderate their pro-life views. The former president, the report continues, has “vented to confidants that the GOP is ‘getting killed on abortion.’” Moreover, he has conspicuously declined to elaborate on how he would capitalize on the new legal landscape created by the repeal of the standards established in Roe and Casey, preferring instead to describe himself as the “most pro-life” president in history and leave it at that.
Trump has made no secret of these views. In January, Trump blamed the GOP’s failure to meet expectations in 2022’s midterms on the “abortion issue,” attacking Republicans who “got their wish” when Roe was repealed only to “just plain disappear.” If Rolling Stone’s reporting is to be believed, Trump is inclined to perform the same disappearing act.
“Is Trump ‘going to try to make us swallow getting next to nothing in return for our support?’” one of these meetings’ beleaguered participants wondered in the interview with Rolling Stone. The answer is yes.
The Rolling Stone article claims that Republican lawmakers and political consultants agree with Trump. The pro-life agenda is an electoral loser, they secretly confess, but the party is so committed to its recalcitrant base that its candidates are functionally hostage to a suicide pact. No shortage of polling indicates that majorities are queasy about the prospect of abortion restrictions inside the first trimester, but the data around so-called 15-week bans are more ambiguous. The electoral record of pro-life Republican candidates further muddles this article’s case.
As National Review’s editors observed, plenty of Republican lawmakers supposedly encumbered by “bold pro-life laws fared well in the November elections.” Anti-abortion legislation animates and mobilizes base Democratic voters, which can make a difference in close elections. But the general electorate is not single-minded. They saw fit to provide Republican candidates with an overall majority of the popular vote for the House in 2022 irrespective of the party’s hostility toward abortion.
Rolling Stone goes so far as to allege that Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano — a candidate who promised to decertify the state’s election results, cancel state contracts with “compromised voting machine companies,” and force all state residents to re-register following a total purge of the voter rolls — lost his race because of his views on abortion. The deficiencies of this publication’s theory of everything are self-evident.
If there is one unifying feature that defines the GOP’s losers in 2022 — and, indeed, as Christian Schneider wrote this week, the recent Wisconsin supreme-court election that inspired Trump’s anxiety — it is that those candidates pledged their fealty to the former president’s addled claim that fraud and theft cost him a second term. On that issue, Trump is not so willing to compromise.
Trump’s attorneys have no intention of letting go of the 2020 stolen-election narrative, its manifest and mounting costs notwithstanding. “We will get Donald Trump back in office,” said Trump lawyer Christina Bobb this year. “And by that point I think we need an investigation into who actually overthrew the United States government to install a fake president in 2020.”
The polling landscape suggests Republican voters are uninterested in moving on from their 2020-related grievances. Last month, a CNN/SSRS survey — whether it’s predicated on “solid evidence” or “suspicion only” — 63 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents said Joe Biden did not legitimately win the presidency. As such, the GOP is still promoting failed candidates to leadership positions within the party solely on their enthusiasm for Trump’s preferred myth.
Trump himself has shown no willingness to pivot. The primary criterion on which he appears to evaluate the candidates he endorses is their capacity to regurgitate his fictions. Only two weeks ago, the former president insisted that America’s election integrity would put a “Third World country” to shame, and all available evidence indicates that the 2020 race’s results should have “been in our favor.”
If Trump was just trying to engineer a grand compromise with political realities following a prudential assessment of his and his party’s electoral viability, the GOP’s long-held pro-life views would not be led first to the chopping block. What Trump is willing to sacrifice are the opinions of others he never held himself. He assumed a pro-life posture in pursuit of a transactional arrangement with an interest group whose utility he now sees as spent. It’s not entirely clear what pro-life leaders would get out of a deal with Trump to support his bid for a second, final term in the White House. Maybe they should start shopping around for a better one.